International

According to Van Dale’s Groot Woordenboek der Nederlandse Taal (The Dutch equivalent of the OED, or Webster's), the word 'commissie' (Commission or Committee) has a range of meanings. It can mean "persons to whom a certain task has been given by an authority". In the Netherlands this would include, for example, the Davids Commission which is investigating the Iraq war. Or, further afield, the European Commission, which forms the day-to-day decision-making executive of the EU. The word 'commissie/commission' can also mean the fee paid to one given a commission. This is well understood in Brussels, where twenty-seven Commissioners each picks up a very nice 'commission' indeed.

It's more than seven years ago that the first Dutch soldiers left for Afghanistan in order to make the country safe and begin its reconstruction. This made the Netherlands one of the pioneers of the western presence. Below, SP Member of Parliament Harry van Bommel, the party's spokesman on foreign affairs, draws up a balance sheet of these years. 'The Netherlands has spent many hundreds of millions of euros in a short space of time in Afghanistan. This has gone primarily on military equipment. On the ground the Afghans have seen very little of it. Just think what good things we could have done with that money!'